slaughterhouse

Datelined Fresno, California, an AP dispatch reports that federal regulators shut down the Central California slaughterhouse of the Central Valley Meat Co., owned by Brian and Lawrence Coelho, after receiving undercover video from an animal welfare group called Compassion Over Killing. Its undercover investigator made the video while employed by the firm for a two-week period in June 2012, for which he produced pay stubs. The USDA moved immediately to shut down the plant while it investigated further. Compassion Over Killing did not partner with a news organization but sent in its own reporter.

CBS "48 Hours" sent a worker into a Federal Beef Processors plant in South Dakota to film questionable practices with a hidden camera provided by the producers.
The company immediately sought and got an injunction to stop CBS from airing the footage, charging that to make it public would divulge trade secrets and damage the local economy. CBS challenged the ruling, which the South Dakota Supreme Court upheld. CBS then appealed to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, who very swiftly overturned the lower court judgment in an emergency ruling and allowed CBS to include the footage in its broadcast without delay. Blackmun refused to exercise prior restraint and argued that to block the network would “cause irreparable harm to the news media and is intolerable under the First Amendment.” The segment aired on February 9, 1994. It made the firm’s name public, ostensibly because of the company’s legal action, and caused the firing of the whistle-blowing employee.

This piece was part of the New York Times "How Race Is Lived" series of 2000, which won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. It was the only piece in the series in which the reporter took a job without disclosure to his employers of his actual intentions.